Virtual Violence Reported to Have Lingering Effects
Forty-four adolescents were observed in the study, each of whom played either a violent game or a nonviolent game for 30 minutes. Medal of Honor: Frontline was designated as the violent game, while Need for Speed Underground was designated as the nonviolent game. Following the gameplay sessiosn, the brain activity of all participants was tracked with functional magnetical resonance imaging while the participants engaged in various tasks requiring concentration. The brain activity of the group assigned to Medal of Honor displayed the lingering affects, whereas those with Need for Speed did not. By choosing a fast paced and exciting game for the nonviolent category, the study attempted to distinguish between specific effects of virtual violence and more general effects of excitement.
"During tasks requiring concentration and processing of emotional stimuli, the adolescents who had played the violent video game showed distinct differences in brain activation than the adolescents who played an equally exciting and fun--but nonviolent--game," Dr. Mathews said. "Additional investigation of the reasons for and effects of this difference in brain functioning will be important targets for future study, but the current study showed that a difference between the groups does exist."
Today's study is likely to be used as ammunition in future political battles over video game legislation.
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mxoadonai
reply44 some fing sample set, how is this science?
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Are you sure you're not thinking of surveys? I don't know how practical it would be to do something like this with a thousand people.
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Surveys really don't use thousands of people, either. It really depends on what you're trying to prove, and with what accuracy.
Most surveys use maybe a thousand people, but even that's for fairly close (within around 3%) divisions. Studies with a much wider spread in projects results tend to use a sample sizes in the few hundreds. -
There is a formula for calculating the required sample size for given levels of accuracy whenever you are not able to evaluate/poll all members of a population you are trying to assess.
http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm
To keep this practical, lets just look at North America. According to this:
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2003/english/ch1/
There are approximately 45 Million adolesents in North America.
Plugging it all in we get a required sample size of 384.
That is, in order to be 95% certain that the results are representative (within 10%) of the population under evaluation they shoud have studied at least 384 10-19 year olds.
Now to Remo's point, this study wasn't a strait audit or poll. It used a test and control methodology to (attempt to) show the effect of violent games. Since their sample size was 44, I'm assuming that they split the test and control groups evenly (22 each). I'm not sure if this methodology has different sample size requirements, but I would question whether or not the 22 subjects studied are representative of their populations. Would they have gotten the same results if they subjects were put into opposite groups? Are the differences between the two groups real, etc.-
There are different formulas for calculating sample sizes for different tests and assumptions. The one you linked assumes a normal distribution and is geared towars statistics along the lines of "X% of people think Y".
There are different techniques and formulas used for scientific studies.
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And adolescents only...
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Hmmm... I suppose, but then it becomes a rather targeted "think of the children" kind of study. Adolescence is also a fairly wide age bracket - are we talking 13 year olds or 18 year olds here? A nice study that factors in all the ages from 10 to 40 would be better, as it would be good to see when emotional responses tail off...
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The effect on 40 year olds isn't really something anybody is concerned about.
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Fair call, but how about 20 year olds though? Where in the adolescence range (13-19) do the ESRB ratings kick in? Is it M17+ in the US?
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